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Google and Amazon slug it out with SSD storage offerings for cloud servers

Firms both announce new block storage services backed by SSD for their cloud server platforms

Cloud computing giants Google and Amazon have both unveiled new solid-state drive (SSD) block storage options for users of their respective virtual machine services, as the highly competitive cloud price war continues to heat up.

Both Amazon and Google have announced new SSD-backed persistent storage options for their respective cloud server offerings, while Google has also added an HTTP Load Balancing feature.

Google said that the new SSD persistent disk product for its Compute Engine service sets a new bar for scalability and performance in Block Storage. It is charging users a flat fee of $0.325 per GB per month and supports up to 30 input/output operations per second (IOPS) per GB.

Google also claimed on its Cloud Platform Blog that "while other providers count each and every IOPS and charge extra for them, SSD persistent disk includes IOPS in the base price with no extra charges or fees, making cost completely predictable and easy to model."

However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a new General Purpose SSD volume type that is now the default option for its Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) service. For this, customers pay $0.10 per GB per month, with no additional charges for I/O.

Customers will, however, still pay for IOPS if they choose the Amazon EBS Provisioned IOPS SSD volume type, which offers consistent and lower-latency performance for demanding applications such as databases.

General Purpose SSD volumes deliver a consistent baseline of three IOPS per GB, Amazon said, but provide the ability to burst to 3,000 IOPS independent of volume size, if required.

Peter De Santis, vice president of Compute at Amazon Web Services, said: "With the introduction of EBS General Purpose SSD volumes today, SSD technology can now be applied to a much broader range of use cases at a lower cost while also delivering high IOPS, low latency and high bandwidth."

Meanwhile, Google also announced HTTP Load Balancing for its customers, claiming it can scale to support more than one million requests per second with no "warm up", through a single external IP address.

Google also said users can take advantage of load balancing across different regions, balancing traffic among compute resources spread across data centres in different parts of the world.